Computer Shopper - UK (2021-01)

EVILCOMPUTERS

ISSUE395|COMPUTER SHOPPER|JANUARY2021 93

D

uringthesixdecadesorsothatthey’vebeenaround,

computers have brought dramatic changes toour

understanding of the world and the ways in which we work

and communicate. Thetechnology has penetrated our

homes, cars and pockets, driving changes in our culture,

behaviour and governance.

Most of this change has been forthe good:wenow

communicatemore easily,can work more efficiently and are better

entertained than ever before.However,the foundations of today’s

technology were built amid the darker motives and necessities of

the Second World Warand the Cold Warthat followed, and the

history of computing contains troubling examples of the pursuit of

power and profit at theexpense of people’s lives.

Computers have been used forevil deeds, and through bugs or

negligence have accidentally committed dreadful acts, but the

ongoing development of artificial intelligence and autonomous

systems raises an even more frightening prospect. Could ever more

intelligent computers be used forever greater evil, or could they

leap above the humanity that created them and, living up to the

darkest imaginings of science fiction, themselves become evil?

Could technological evolution reach atipping point beyond which

humans, when it comes to survival, are no longer ‘the fittest’?

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Computer-basedtechnologiessuchasGPSanddigitalX-rayshelpto

protectandsaveliveseveryday,butmoderncomputersarebuilt

uponadvances undertaken in darker times. The origins of

computing were innocent enough, with some of the earliest

programmable machines developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard to

automatelooms in the textile industry in the 1800s. The first

theoretical computer,Charles Babbage’s ‘analytical engine’, was

originally devised simply to remove human errors from the

mathematical tables available in the early 19th century.

The motivations forthese inventions mayhavebeen innocent,

but the computer as we understand it todaywasn’t fully imagined

until the years leading up to World WarII, and it was the war that

provided the money, facilities and impetus forthe theories of

computer scientists such as Alan Turing to be made real. It was the

need among the analysts at BletchleyPark formassive computing

power that drove development, first of the electromechanical

‘Bombe’and ‘Heath Robinson’machines and subsequently of

Colossus –the first programmable,digital, electronic computer.

Being the product of awar effort doesn’t automatically render a

computer ‘evil’,ofcourse.The Colossus computers were famously

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Technologymayhaveenrichedallourlives,butithasalsobeen

usedfornefariouspurposesby unscrupulousgovernments,

criminalsandterrorists.In Shopper 302,SimonHandby revealed

howcomputershelpedtoperpetrateevilaroundtheworld